Tag: Introduction

Instead of the usual boring block of text introducing myself and this blog, I’m going to begin as I intend to go on – by telling a story.

I was five, and had just started year one in primary school. I had a fascination with stones – smooth polished agate, amethyst, or smoky quartz. If it was pretty and shiny, I loved it. Being five, I also liked to put the stones in my mouth.

One weekend, I was hanging upside down from my swing set like the tiny little monkey I was. I had a pretty polished stone in my pocket, and I decided my mouth was the perfect place to keep it safe. Obviously, I swallowed it.

After the prerequisite trip to the doctor, I went back to school, where we were encouraged to write about what we had done on our weekends in our journals. Instead of sticking to the facts, I wrote a really simple story about swallowing the stone, how at its centre was a seed, and that seed grew into a tree in my belly, which in turn produced more and more trees. Instead of a stone, I now had a forest in my stomach. I drew a picture underneath of a tiny brown-haired girl with a giant tree in her middle.

It’s the first clear memory I have of properly writing down a story. I’ve since written and discarded so many ideas that might have eventuated into something more, if I’d had a little more patience. This blog seems like the perfect way to keep track of what I write, of patiently collecting ideas and snippets of prose, and maybe turning one of those ideas into something worth publishing.